We’re not an especially multicultural group out here in the valley.
Now and then we’ll have an exchange student at the high school who is
visiting from another country, and the Amish are like a permanently
foreign society in our midst, but on my daughter’s softball team there
are no black or brown faces, no accents.

That makes the recent wave of immigration demonstrations, the boycotts
and the marches through the downtowns of major cities hard to grasp.
We don’t have migrant farm workers picking our crops in this part of
Pennsylvania, though I've seen small groups of Latino men on the streets
of Chambersburg early in the morning, waiting to be picked up to work in
the orchards in the southern part of the state.

To put a real face to the marchers and protesters, I have to go back to
the 1980s when I worked in a hotel in downtown San Francisco.
That little hotel was like a mini-United Nations, representing a dozen
foreign languages and cultures. I could walk in the front door and
be greeted by a French or Irish bellman; stop at the front desk where
the manager was from the Philippines and the telephone operator was
native Hawaiian; go downstairs to punch in and speak to housekeepers
from Central America and Mexico. The owners were Japanese and the
general manager was Mexican. I was one of the rare, native-born US
citizens on the staff.

This was before multiculturalism became a buzz word with its
touchy-feely overtones, and its checklist cooked up by the human
resources department. We didn't spend a lot of time swapping
recipes or doing diversity workshops. We all just lived in a city
that was itself a giant workshop, and people who were intolerant of
different cultures did not fare well.

But over time, I did get to know some of the back story of the people I
worked with every day. One of the housemen, Germai, was a thin,
balding, dark-skinned man in his early thirties. He was so
mild-mannered and shy that even some of the meeker housekeepers tended
to boss him around. I knew he was from Eritrea, a war-scarred country in
northeast Africa, but I was surprised to learn that for fifteen years he
had been a soldier there, living in the hills or on the battlefield,
before he threw away his rifle and somehow escaped to America.

I also got to know another refugee from civil war, Anna, a mother of
three from El Salvador where the famous US-supported Contras were
killing suspected left-wing sympathizers. She never said that she
was in the country illegally, but she always talked to me in a guarded
voice and acted as though people were watching her. Anna was in
her late twenties and having a hard time of it on a housekeeper's
salary, with three children and a husband who was either dead or
fighting the Contras. But like Germai, she was tougher than she appeared
and didn't ask for anything she hadn't earned.

The essayist Eliot Weinberger writes that it is hard to underestimate
America’s near total ignorance of the rest of the world. He says,
“Outside of certain nomadic tribes in the rain forests and deserts,
there is no more insular society on earth.” For a country made up
almost entirely of immigrants, and fairly recent immigrants by
historical standards, our lack of interest in the rest of the world is
baffling.

In every wealthy modern country the birthrate is falling and thepopulation is growing gray. If we want our economy to prosper, we
will need those immigrants, both the poor and the highly trained who
fill the graduate schools of our universities.